


the past is just a goodbye

by Sholio



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, Family, Feels, Fix-It, Friendship, Gen, Kid Fic, Post-Movie: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-26
Updated: 2017-05-29
Packaged: 2018-11-05 03:10:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 9,321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11004729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Five times Peter Quill had to deal with a de-aged teammate, and one time he was in that position himself. (Brought on by realizing that GotG2 was basically canon de-aging fic for Groot, which made me wonder what therestof them would be like.)





	1. Rocket

**Author's Note:**

> I don't really imagine most of these happening in the same continuity -- it's more like a what-if for each character, since it strains credibility a trifle that this would have happened to ALL of them. The big exception is the last two, Yondu's and Peter's, which are definitely in continuity with each other. 
> 
> For my h/c bingo "de-age" square.
> 
> Title from CSN's "Teach Your Children." Wow, does this fandom ever lend itself to song-lyric titles.

So, first of all, baby raccoons were even more adorable than Peter had realized. (Mantis's shriek of delight could be heard all over the ship.)

Second: baby raccoons bite. Hard.

Peter couldn't figure out exactly how smart Rocket was at this age. The tiny, masked ball of fluff was definitely brighter than the average baby raccoon, but he was also distinctly ... well ... animal-like, bristling and hissing and puffing up his fur whenever anyone came near him, and fleeing into the darkest, most hidden part of the ship he could find. Which was most of it. Peter thought they were never going to get him out of the ventilation system, but Gamora lured him out with bits of food, and once they made him a little nest under the bed in his quarters -- containing a blanket and a handwarmer cannibalized from a cold-weather suit so he had something warm to cuddle up to -- he ended up spending a lot of time there. 

It made dealing with him a lot easier once Peter managed to shift mental gears from "winning the trust of the child version of my friend/brother" to "taming a wild baby animal". However, baby Rocket also liked to steal bits of technology from all over the ship and collect them in his nest (electrical parts, gun components, explosives, even Peter's Zune a time or two) which didn't really strike him as normal raccoon behavior.

Peter wasn't sure why, but it somehow seemed to matter to him to get Rocket to trust him. He spent hours lying on the floor in Rocket's quarters (and frankly, the floor of Rocket's quarters wasn't a fun place to be), holding out a hand with tidbits of food, or just talking to him quietly while Rocket watched him from under the bed with bright, wary eyes.

"I know you've been hurt," Peter said softly. "No one on this ship is going to hurt you. I promise."

He couldn't tell if he was getting through. He couldn't even tell if Rocket understood a single word he said. He kept right on wondering until the time he woke in his darkened quarters with something small, warm, and solid tucked into the space between his forearm and hip. 

Peter went very still and looked down at Rocket, who'd crept onto his bed while he was sleeping and curled up in a tiny furry ball against him.

Hesitantly he cupped his hand around the baby raccoon and went back to sleep.


	2. Mantis

It looked like they were going to have to spend the entire voyage in the company of a small cocoon, at least until they figured out how to get her back to normal, but then the cocoon hatched into a tiny adorable bug-child that was half eyes.

Her reaction to every person she came in contact with was a delighted "Eeeee!" and holding out her arms to be picked up.

If Peter had been able to, he would very happily have gone back and killed Ego again.


	3. Gamora

The first thing she did was kick Peter in the shins and flee into the ductwork.

It soon became evident that she thought she was being abducted. Once they managed to convince her that they were "friends of her parents," she was a lot easier to deal with, cute and bright and charming, with a particular fondness for Drax (who turned out to be remarkably good with small children; Peter kept forgetting he'd had a daughter) and Mantis.

She looked about five or six. It was the first time Peter had realized she'd actually been old enough to remember her parents, at least somewhat, before Thanos took her and slaughtered her people, because she was clearly a happy Gamora from a happy home and not a miniature assassin-in-training. It was a tiny window into the past she rarely spoke of, a glimpse of the inner Gamora that her friends rarely saw ... but it also felt like a violation. He hoped, for her sake, that she didn't remember any of this when they got her back to normal.

If they got her back to normal.

Gut-punched as he felt at the possibility of losing his friend and all the unspoken potential that went along with that (it had been bad enough with Groot), he also wondered, in some small part of his soul, how much better off she might be if she got to grow up with them, rather than in the living hell she'd gone through the first time.

_But isn't that true of any of us?_ And it wasn't right that she didn't get to make the choice. If it happened to him, the idea of losing all of that -- his memories, his friendships, the people he'd loved ... having to start over ... no. He wouldn't choose that.

Anyway, there was an additional problem: they were due for one of their semi-regular rendezvous with Nebula to exchange intel on Thanos and occasionally to barter supplies. Usually Gamora handled the meet-and-greet part of these meetings. (Peter usually tried to refrain from calling it "Sisters' Day Out" in Gamora's hearing, but he didn't try all that hard.) Now, however, Gamora was a small green child clutching a many-legged stuffed toy Drax had sewn for her.

"So, look, if we meet her without Gamora, there are two ways I see this going down," Peter said. "Either she won't talk to us at all, or she decides we got her sister killed, and kills all of us."

Mantis clapped her hands over a wide-eyed Gamora's ears. Peter winced. In retrospect, raising Groot hadn't been very good training for raising a normal child, and neither was growing up with a bunch of space pirates.

"Well, you better figure it out quick, guys," Rocket reported, "'cuz she's hailing us."

As soon as Nebula came on the screen with her characteristic scowl, Peter tried to sit up straight and look captainly. "So --" he began.

"Where is my sister?" Nebula demanded.

"Well -- that's complicated --"

Tiny green arms wrapped suddenly around his neck as Gamora clambered, monkeylike, over the back of his pilot's chair. "Hi!" she crowed. "Are you my long-lost sister I've never met?"

Despite his legitimate concern that they were all about to be blown into space slag, Peter wished he'd had a camera to memorialize the look of boggled shock on Nebula's face.

"What have you idiots _done?"_

Gamora dropped into Peter's lap and leaned forward, staring eagerly up at the screen. Nebula stared back as if she'd seen a ghost.

"I ..." She hesitated and cleared her throat, forcing her gaze front and center, trying not to look at the child in Peter's lap. Her voice firmed, became brisk and businesslike. "I need power cells for laser cannons. I have supplies to trade."

As soon as Nebula signed off, with another boggled/horrified look at Gamora, a team argument erupted over whether to take Gamora along to the meeting or not. Gamora's opinion was clear ("I want to meet my siiiisterrrrrr!") but Peter didn't think it was _completely_ unreasonable to have doubts about taking a five-year-old along to an arms deal. (He'd been _at least_ nine before he'd gone along to _his_ first arms deal.) Still, there was also the entirely legitimate point that Nebula might notice that she wasn't with them and decide to kill them all.

"She will not kill _me_ \--"

"Yes she will, Drax, because you're just as susceptible to being shot in the head as the rest of us."

They compromised on keeping Gamora out of sight, but close enough to be hastily brought in if it seemed things were going south with Nebula, provided it didn't look like she'd be in too much danger. Of course, it went the way of all their plans as soon as Nebula stepped out of the airlock, when Gamora dashed between Peter's legs and flung her arms around Nebula's knees, while everyone in the cargo bay froze for a heartbeat of stunned horror.

"Drax!" Peter protested. "You were supposed to be holding her!"

"She's wiggly!"

Most of the people in the room who had weapons now had a hand on them, Nebula among them, but mainly she was staring down at the miniature version of Gamora clinging to her leg. "Hello, tiny person who looks like my sister," she said after a moment, her voice coming out in a flat rush of words.

"I _am_ your sister. At least they say so, and they're nice. What's that thing on your face? Why don't you look like me? Is that a robot hand? Why didn't anyone tell me I had a sister?"

Nebula blinked and made a small throat-clearing noise before looking back at the rest of Gamora's teammates with a look that absolutely dared them to mention what was currently going on around the vicinity of her knees. "About those power cells," she said flatly.

Negotiations continued over the top of a steady stream of Gamora's questions and Nebula's surreptitious efforts to detach her. Peter kept having to stifle himself from saying parental things like "Gamora, don't bother Nebula, she's working."

He didn't think she was in actual danger, though. He still wasn't convinced it would be a good idea to leave Gamora in Nebula's unsupervised care, but ... well ... to be entirely honest, leaving Gamora (or any other child) in _their_ unsupervised care was probably not something that any sane person would have done, and they'd managed okay.

When the crates of supplies and armaments had been inspected and exchanged, Nebula visibly steeled herself, leaned down, and peeled the limpet off her leg, lifting Gamora under her armpits and holding her out at arm's length.

"Hi," Gamora said, and curled up her legs with a delighted giggle.

"Hi," Nebula said and thrust her in the direction of the nearest person, who happened to be Drax. He took her wordlessly, holding her despite her attempts to wiggle free and reattach herself.

Nebula turned and grasped Peter in a punishing grip just below his elbow. He tried to stifle a squawk and convince himself that she wasn't intentionally digging her robot fingers into a pressure point.

Leaning close, she murmured, "I assume that you're planning to fix this."

"We're working on it. You know, your hand's a little ... tight ..."

Nebula leaned even closer, until her breath ghosted across the skin just below his ear. "Do I need to explain what will happen to you if any harm befalls her in the meantime?"

"No ... no, I think imagination is more than sufficient for that part."

Nebula shoved him away and strode back to her ship.

"Nooooo, don't gooooo!" Gamora wailed after her. Nebula's shoulders tightened, hunching up. Peter had never realized it was possible to slam an airlock, but Nebula somehow managed to do it.

Drax set her down so he could load the crates onto one of Rocket's cargo lifts. She looked so woebegone that Peter picked her up and let her drape her arms around his neck and put her head on his shoulder.

"Will Nebula come back and play with me, Peter?"

"Oh, 'course she will. We can't seem to make her stay away."

This perked her up. "I like having a sister. She's so cool. She had a robot hand, did you see that? Can _I_ have a robot hand? Please?"


	4. Drax

Unsurprisingly, Drax as a toddler was about like Peter would've expected him to be: cheerful, energetic, prone to blurting out anything that came into his head, and lacking in any impulse control whatsoever. For the most part, he was exactly like the adult version, except easier to deal with because it was a lot easier to physically restrain him when he weighed less than 40 pounds.

For the most part.

"He is so happy," Mantis whispered, holding the sleeping gray-skinned child in her arms, as her eyes brimmed with tears. "He is so very, very happy."

Peter left them alone. There wasn't really anything to say to that.


	5. Yondu

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one deals with Yondu's fate in the movie, to some extent, so all associated spoilers and feels apply ...
> 
> Also edited to add [gorgeous fanart by dis4daria on Tumblr](http://dis4daria.tumblr.com/post/162215085239/guess-who-is-still-not-over-guardians-of-the) (at the end of the chapter). BABY YONDU IS TOO CUTE FOR WORDS.

Well, this was what they got for messing around with unknown alien technology in ancient, abandoned ruins, Peter thought in numb shock as a five-year-old version of his deceased space-pirate dad attempted to kill them.

The only reason why they hadn't all died in the first five seconds was that this tiny, scrawny, scarred version of Yondu didn't seem to have the arrow yet. He had a series of scars down the top of his scalp with tiny, winking metal contacts for something that either wasn't installed yet, or else the alien device, however it had done what it had done, had not been able to create that part.

All Yondu was wearing was a loincloth and metal bands on his wrists and ankles. Still, he'd managed to steal one of Gamora's knives and Rocket's guns, and now they were attempting to hunt him in the ruins without being killed in the process. Despite limping from his almost-successful attempt to kneecap her, Gamora managed to distract him long enough for Rocket to sneak up behind him and stun him.

"You know it's not him, right?" Rocket asked quietly, standing with his gun at the ready as Peter, over Rocket's objections, knelt beside the spindly-limbed blue child. "It's not him, Quill. It's something that machine in there built for you out of your memories and your grief."

"I don't have any memories of him like this," Peter answered absently. He'd mistaken the cuffs at first for some sort of bracelets, but with a clenching wave of sickness in the pit of his stomach, he recognized them for what they really were -- recognized them by the swollen, bruised flesh around their edges, where they'd chafed and no one had done anything about it. Tiny traceries of circuitry ran through the silver metal. Meant for delivering shocks, maybe. He shuddered again. "Rocket, I need a knife or something that can cut through these. I'm not leaving them on him."

Rocket rolled his eyes, but shifted his grip on the gun to hand over a laser cutting tool. "You're makin' a mistake, Quill," he said, his voice unusually gentle as he watched Peter, with exquisite care, cut the cuffs from the child's thin wrists and pry them out of the sores they'd worn through his blue skin. "It's not _him."_

"I don't care," was Peter's equally soft response. "I'm not leaving this planet without him."

 

***

 

So now they had a very angry five-year-old Centaurian battle slave running around on the ship.

Peter and, to his surprised gratification, Rocket were the only ones who argued for not locking him up. "Ain't right," Rocket muttered, not meeting the others' eyes. "Kill him on the planet, that's one thing, but put a kid in a cage, on our ship ... no, we ain't doing that."

"I don't see how it's better to allow him to kill Mantis and Quill as they sleep," Drax said.

"Just them?" Gamora inquired, giving Drax a narrow-eyed look. "The rest of us don't count?"

"The rest of us are not so pathetic as to be murdered in our sleep by a small child."

He was probably right about that.

Still, Peter and Rocket prevailed through sheer stubbornness. As Peter pointed out, the ship really wasn't a democracy and anyway "do you really want to argue with Rocket on this? You've seen how he gets even with people, right?"

Even Peter had a few doubts the first day or two, because there were a _lot_ of ways the tiny, loose-cannon version of Yondu could really fuck them over. But if nothing else, Yondu had always been both smart and practical, and Peter had to trust that this version was too -- enough to refrain from doing something like sabotaging their life support and killing them all in deep space, at least.

Still, Drax probably wasn't wrong about murdering them in their sleep. Peter locked down everything that had a lock (the space suits, the weapons). He didn't blame the others for keeping their quarters locked.

He didn't lock his own, though.

No murders or even attempted murders occurred. It was simply weird, like having a poltergeist around. Gamora said she'd had two more knives go missing when she turned her back on them in the sparring room. Rocket thought he might be missing a couple of grenades. ("Well, that'll teach you to leave your grenades lying around," Peter snapped, while nervously contemplating how to beef up the security on the weapons storage.)

They left food out, which went untouched for two days and then suddenly started disappearing at a rapid rate. (New plan: locking the food storage chamber as well.) Other than that, it was actually very easy to forget their small guest was around, at least until Peter woke, with a jolt, to the cool sensation of a blade against his throat.

He lay very still, looking up at the child crouched with one bony knee on his chest. Yondu's eyes glittered in the light coming in from the hallway through the open door of Peter's quarters. Peter tried to tell himself it wasn't the first time Yondu had put a blade (or an arrow point) to his throat, wasn't the first time Yondu had threatened to kill him. Tried to slow his beating heart, to wet his lips with a desert-dry tongue. He wasn't dead yet, and Yondu could easily have slit his throat while he slept, which meant ... what? (Well, besides the fact that if Yondu had actually done it, Drax and Gamora would be able to say "I told you so" to his corpse until the end of time.)

"Hi, kid," he whispered.

The child flinched; the blade jerked against Peter's neck. He felt something warm and wet trickling down his skin. It was Gamora's knife and therefore razor sharp. Peter started to swallow and then thought better of it.

"I'm Peter," he whispered. "Which I realize means nothing to you. Do you understand me? Do you have a translator implant yet?"

The boy's eyes gleamed in the dark. The knife pressed closer to Peter's jugular.

"Listen, you don't want to kill me," he babbled softly. "I mean, it's not going to make much sense to you right now, but you and me, we're ... look, I don't know how to explain in a way you'd understand. You don't want to kill me. There's a part of you -- there was a version of you, once, who'd feel really, really bad about it --"

He broke off, because there was not a hint of recognition in the gleaming red eyes. Peter's eyes stung suddenly, prickling with unshed tears; a lump rose in his throat.

Because Rocket was right; he just hadn't wanted to admit it. This wasn't Yondu, not Peter's Yondu. There was still a part of Peter that hoped they could find some way to restore Yondu to who he used to be, but none of that mattered right now. The important thing was, there was a scared child in front of him, a child who had known nothing but hate and abuse for his entire life.

And Peter knew what it was like, to be alone and terrified and surrounded by menacing strangers.

"I won't hurt you," he whispered. "I won't _ever_ hurt you. I know you don't have any reason to believe me. I know no one's ever done anything _but_ hurt you. You don't know us, don't know anything about us, and I understand that, but I don't know how to prove it to you ..."

He moved slightly, starting to raise a hand, and the boy jerked, the knife jerked -- Peter froze, as more of his blood traced a thin, ticklish thread down his neck. "There's something on the shelf there," he said softly, rolling his eyes -- the only part of him he dared move -- toward the shelf at the head of his sleeping nook. "Music. I listen to it a lot. You might have heard me playing some songs on the ship's system. If you listen to it, it'll teach you more about us. Where we come from. Who we are."

He finally got confirmation that the boy could understand him, because the gleaming red eyes (nearly black in the dark, glinting with jewel-like ruby highlights) flicked in the direction he'd indicated.

"Take it. You gave it to me in the first place. I'm giving it back."

Silence. The boy was unmoving as a statue. Peter's neck stung like a shaving cut, and he tried not to think about how deeply the knife had already penetrated his skin, how close it was to vital veins and arteries. He'd seen Gamora use those knives on people; he knew how they could cleave through muscle, through flesh, through _windpipes_ as easily as soft butter.

But then, with a sudden thrust of extra pressure to Peter's chest, the boy sprang away. He landed lightly on the floor without making a sound. He stood for a moment, backlit by the door, a thin quiet statue; his face was in shadow, so Peter couldn't make out his expression. And then he seemed to fade into the shadows, there one minute, gone the next. Peter glimpsed the faintest hint of a shadow in the doorway, and afterwards the silence seemed somehow a little emptier than it had a moment ago.

He hadn't taken the Zune, but he hadn't taken Peter's life either, so that was something.

Peter lay still for a few long moments, measured by his pounding heartbeat, until his heart rate began to slow to something less akin to a heart attack. He reached up with trembling fingers and touched his throat. His hand came away sticky. After another moment or two, he got up and managed not to wobble too much as he went into the little bathroom cubicle and flicked on the light.

It didn't look bad as bad as he'd feared, just a smear of blood across the pale skin of his throat, a few drops splattered on his T-shirt. He wiped his neck with the wet corner of a towel and inspected the nearly invisible cut, less than an inch long. Hopefully it wasn't obvious enough that anyone would notice; he didn't need to admit that he'd almost had his throat cut in his own quarters by the space orphan he'd insisted on bringing home. They would really never let him hear the end of it.

He had to force himself not to keep looking over his shoulder. Yondu had just had a knife at his throat. If he wanted to kill Peter, he could've done it. He wasn't going to come up and jab a knife between Peter's shoulder blades now.

Or so he told himself.

_He could've killed me, but he didn't. Well, I guess some things about us never change._

He came out of the bathroom and instantly had the feeling that something was different. He couldn't quite put his finger on it until he sat down on his bed, reached by habit for the Zune, and his fingers closed on empty air.

Peter smiled to himself. He lay down on his bed, facing the door.

It might have been the first time since Yondu's death that he fell asleep without the earbuds in. It wasn't as hard as he thought it would be.

 

***

 

One of the first things Peter had done after getting the Zune was load all of the music into the ship's computer. It had taken him a long time to make his way through all 300 songs; there were some he'd listened to over and over, and still a few he hadn't listened to at all. It was like opening presents, a _bunch_ of presents, and it was also the last gift he would ever receive from Yondu, so he'd been making it last.

Since the kid version of Yondu had the Zune at the moment -- doing God knows what with it; the thought occurred to Peter that showing him how to use it might have been a good idea -- Peter took to listening to music out loud. He already did that some of the time, but now he just let it play, so he had a constant soundtrack following him around: in the sparring room, in the mess, on the bridge. He even let it play him softly to sleep.

The others were better sports about it than Peter thought they would be, which made him suspect they thought he was using the music to cope with some kind of deep-seated trauma, which he absolutely was _not._ He just missed the damn Zune and hoped kid-Yondu hadn't destroyed it.

"Well, on the bright side," Rocket remarked, "at least it ain't the same eight songs as that other thing you had."

"It was more than eight, and I've heard you singing along to every one of them."

Rocket curled a lip at him. "Just for that, I won't tell you where the kid's hanging out."

"You know where he is?" Peter said, startled.

"Nobody knows this ship like me, Quill, on account of nobody fits into all the places I do. Yeah, he's got a kinda little nest behind the spare oxy tanks. Got an assload of stuff in there, too. I knew he'd been thievin' but not the extent of it. He's got everything in there from Gamora's spare boots to a pile of Groot's leaves." Rocket winked. "I got you a present, if you say the magic words."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Good enough." Rocket reached into his bag and brought out a small boxy shape, which he held out. Peter stared at the familiar shape of his Zune.

"I was expecting a little more gratitude. 'Thanks for getting it back from the thievin' blue kid, Rocket.' There, said it for you."

"No!" Peter shoved it back at him. "Jeez, man. Put it back."

Rocket lowered the Zune, looked at him critically for a moment, and then scrambled forward.

"Hey!" Peter found himself trying to bat raccoon paws away from his face. "What're you doing?"

"Seeing if you're running a fever, because you just told me to give your most prized possession to the feral child living in our ventilation system."

"It was me -- erk -- no paws in the _mouth,_ man, ugh. It was me that gave it to him in the first place."

"You what now?"

"I thought it might help him, the way the Walkman helped me."

"Quill." Rocket started to speak, stopped, shook his head, and started over. "Peter. Yondu isn't you. And _he's_ not Yondu. Not the one you knew."

"I _know_ that. You think I don't know that? Anyway." Peter turned away, viciously clamping down on the emotions that wanted to well to the surface. "Just give him the damn thing back. Don't let him get the idea you've been snooping around in his stuff. If he's ever gonna get used to being on this ship, he needs a place he feels safe."

 

***

 

He really meant to stick to the spirit and not just the letter of what he'd said to Rocket. The last thing he wanted to do was to make Yondu feel threatened enough to relocate to some other area of the ship where he'd be even harder to find. Still, knowing where he was made it harder for Peter to ignore (or try to ignore) his presence.

It was just a coincidence that he took to hanging out in that part of the ship a lot. Really. He had things to do there. Important things.

He could see why child-Yondu liked it back here, though, at the very back of the cargo hold where they kept emergency supplies, backup equipment, and other stuff they didn't get into very much. It wasn't exactly quiet (the engines and the life support system both made a lot of noise this close), but it was relatively private, at least about as close as you could get to it on a small ship with six other people.

He was sitting with his back against the wall among some crates, reading an adventure book-tablet Rocket had picked up on their last planetary stop and humming along to the soft strains of ELO echoing from a higher deck, when he became aware that he was being watched. Peter looked up and smiled at kid-Yondu watching him from between two crates.

"Hi, kid," he said softly.

He expected the boy to retreat -- Mantis and Gamora both said they'd seen him around, but that he disappeared if they didn't ignore him completely -- but somewhat to his surprise, Yondu stayed, mostly in the shadows so Peter couldn't see much more than a flash of skinny blue limbs and the glitter of red eyes.

"Hey. Want to try some of this?" He'd discovered a new snack that he liked -- supposed to be non-toxic to 99% of sentient life (Peter had definitely started reading that part of every label after a few bad experiences during his first couple of years in space) and tasted vaguely like grape, with a bright pink packaging. He had a couple cakes of it beside him, and he ripped one open, took a bite, then tossed it in Yondu's direction.

The kid vanished into the shadows. Oops.

"It's just food," Peter called. "It's not going to hurt you, I swear." He tore open the other one and nibbled on it. He'd lost most of his appetite. _The one time he shows up and doesn't run away, and I scare him off ..._

But it was only temporary. Curiosity seemed to get the better of Yondu: he reappeared on top of the crate, surveyed Peter and the general area from a crouch, then hopped down and grabbed the snack before vanishing among the crates again.

Peter had gotten a better look at him this time. He was wearing a T-shirt that looked like one of Gamora's. It looked to Peter like he'd filled out a little; he was no longer as painfully thin as he had been when they'd first picked him up. (Picked him up. Abducted him. Okay, the semantic line was finer than Peter had realized.) The dark blue bruises that had mottled his wrists and ankles were healing.

Peter began to sing along quietly to the music filtering down from the ship's sound system. It wasn't really a deliberate attempt to get Yondu's attention again -- it was just a thing that he did without really thinking about it -- but Yondu reappeared a moment later, holding something.

The Zune.

"It plays music," Peter said. He pointed in a vague upstairs direction, where Pink Floyd was playing now. "The same music you've been listening to. Do you know how to use it?"

After a hesitation, Yondu shook his head. Peter's heart lurched; a direct response to a question was more interaction than any of them had been able to achieve with him so far.

"I can show you," he said, holding out a hand. "I won't take it away. I just want to show you how it's done."

Yondu hesitated, staring at him. One hand clutched the Zune; the other held a knife. Peter didn't even know where he'd drawn it from.

He couldn't help thinking of himself back in those early days on Yondu's ship, young and grieving and terrified. He hadn't been this traumatized, but then again, no one had been trying to coax him out of his shell, either. Or, well, he thought Yondu might actually have been trying, come to think of it, but it didn't really come across that way to a baffled eight-year-old who had known nothing except Meredith Quill's gentle upbringing on Earth.

Yondu was many things, but _gentle_ was something he had rarely managed to be.

Peter realized now, from the vantage of adulthood and with a round of semi-parenthood for Groot under his belt, that the bafflement had been mutual; _neither_ of them had any idea what they were doing in those early days. Yondu didn't have a clue how to deal with a kid on a pirate ship, any more than Peter knew how to be one. So they'd yelled at each other a lot, and Peter had refused to do a damn thing he was told. He'd spent half his time hiding from the pirates and sobbing alone in various private places he found around the ship, and the other half making life as difficult as he possibly could for Yondu, in the hopes that if he made himself into the world's most annoying hostage, he'd be taken home.

And then, slowly ...

Then, slowly, he'd woken up to the marvel of the place he was living in. For an eight-year-old boy who'd just lost his mother, being dumped into the middle of a bunch of violent, vulgar pirates was a nightmare. For a ten-year-old who had had time to learn a few things from the school of hard knocks, it was more of a dream come true, a child's fantasy of running away (to the circus, to a pirate ship, to the stars) that had actually come true. There were a thousand alien worlds to explore -- albeit with Yondu's hand on the collar of his tiny Ravager jacket, ready to yank him out of trouble. No school, no early bedtimes, no one ordering him to eat his vegetables.

All of those usual trappings of parental affection had instead been wrapped up in a pair of big, callused blue hands over his smaller ones, showing him how to hold a gun, how to pilot a spaceship.

And now the tiny version of those hands were holding out the Zune to him.

Swallowing the lump in his throat (he'd thought he was mostly over Yondu's death, he really had, but the past few weeks had been testing his emotional stability in a major way) he accepted it with slow, careful movements. He checked the Zune over quickly, finding it intact and undamaged. 

"See," he said, demonstrating with the earbuds, "these go in your ears, and you turn it on by touching it here. You can switch songs like this, and turn the volume up or down if it's too loud for you ... here."

Leaving the music playing, he held it out again.

Yondu took it from him quickly and retreated what he seemed to consider to a safe distance. Copying Peter's demonstration, he held up one of the earbuds to his ear, and flinched when he heard the music coming out.

"You put them in," Peter told him, pointing to his own ears.

The kid sat down with his back against a crate, laid the knife beside him where it was in easy grabbing distance, and started fiddling with the controls. Peter tried to pretend that he was reading his book, but actually he was watching over the top of it -- trying very hard not to stare. He didn't want to scare the kid off again. But it was so fascinating to look for echoes of Yondu in this strange child ... like trying to read a letter in a different dialect of a language Peter had known in childhood, seeking familiar patterns in something half strange and half not.

The faint, tinny echo of the music changed and changed again as Yondu figured out how to change songs. Suddenly he must have found something he liked, because he grinned -- a quick flash of a smile with tiny, even teeth, just a little bit pointier than human-standard.

And that -- _that_ punched Peter under the ribs and took his breath away, because _there_ was Yondu, right there, in that quick little grin. It was the same fast grin Peter had seen the first time he'd managed to solo-dock the Milano (except it hadn't been called the Milano then), the same grin that had flashed when Peter had gone out on a pre-heist scouting mission and come back with his hands full of gemstones.

Rocket said this kid wasn't Yondu and he wasn't completely wrong, but at the same time he didn't know what Peter knew. He hadn't spent the formative years of his life pulling cons with the old blue bastard. He hadn't had that same blue bastard drag him back to the ship bleeding, and then patch him up with hands that were rough yet oddly gentle where they needed to be, while snarling insults and instructions for next time. 

Rocket hadn't seen Yondu badly hurt; drunk; scared. He hadn't been twelve years old and spent two weeks delirious from a fever he thought was going to kill him, only to wake up tangled in sweat-soaked sheets with Yondu sitting beside him, staring at him with a look he couldn't decipher at the time.

(Love. It was probably love. He just didn't recognize it at the time, and he thought maybe Yondu didn't either.)

So yeah, Rocket knew about a whole lot of things, but Peter had a master-class degree in Elements of Yondu, and this tiny, broken, violent child _was_ Yondu -- a version of Yondu who needed him.

A second chance, to give back what he never even realized he owed while there was still time.

The kid looked up from playing with the Zune's controls. After an uncertain moment when Peter wasn't quite sure what either of them were going to do, Yondu flashed Peter a hesitant, shy grin.

And Peter grinned back.

  
[Fanart by dis4daria on Tumblr](http://dis4daria.tumblr.com/post/162215085239/guess-who-is-still-not-over-guardians-of-the)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is one more chapter after this one, Peter's chapter, which will also be long and will be set in the same continuity with the Yondu one, but that one won't be up for a couple of days. I figured there was no need to wait 'til I had the whole thing done, since the chapters more or less stand on their own. 
> 
> As you can probably see, I started out with the idea of doing short little vignettes for each of them, and things got out of control. Especially in this particular case.


	6. Peter

The thing that broke Gamora's heart most of all about child-Peter was that she was unable to give him the music player he wanted so much. She tried offering him the Zune that his adult self had also loved, but he refused, insisting that he wanted the Walkman. He seemed to believe that they'd stolen it. Well, to be specific, he seemed to believe Yondu had stolen it.

Yondu, only recently restored to his adult self with all his adult memories, had been slinking around the ship as if he wasn't quite able to look anyone in the eye (Peter especially), after having been a small, traumatized child around them for months. Still, Gamora was able to infer that this small version of Peter must be slightly older than he had been when Yondu and his crew had picked him up on Earth, because he clearly knew who Yondu was and hated him with a burning passion.

He was distrustful of the rest of them in the beginning, but warmed up cautiously. Mostly he was lonely and sad and wanted to be taken home. From his perspective, his mother had died only a few months ago, perhaps no more than a few weeks. His obvious grief and loneliness tugged at Gamora's heart; in some small way, she saw the echo of her own pain when her parents had been murdered at Thanos's hands.

As soon as Yondu came into a room, though, Peter's warmth went cold; his friendliness blazed up into anger. Peter was a sweet child, but he was also a child carrying around quite a lot of anger for one so young, and it was obvious that he knew exactly where to direct it.

But most of it was only a form of hurt, and only because they had no way to explain to him why he couldn't go back to the planet he came from. And he didn't have his music to give him even a temporary sort of comfort.

"If I'm very good, can I go home?" he asked Gamora softly while she was feeding him in the ship's mess, and her heart twisted painfully again.

_Once, you thought THIS was home,_ she wanted to say, but nothing in those words would comfort this lonely, motherless child.

"We're working on it," she told him helplessly. It was the only answer they'd managed to find for him. They could have jumped to Earth in a bare handful of days, and she had seriously entertained the thought of doing so, but what could such an effort accomplish, except to hurt a child who remembered nothing of the last twenty-five years? All they could do was put him off.

"I know," he said, smiling hesitantly at her, and then he looked past her and his small face darkened in a scowl. Gamora looked around to confirm what she'd already known, that Yondu had walked into the room. 

Coat flaring out behind him, he barely hesitated -- but she was aware of it; she hadn't survived her assassin's training without learning how to read the barest vestiges of body language -- before he went to the chilled locker where they kept unpackaged food. He didn't bother to look across the room, but Gamora knew he was well aware of them; she could read that too.

Peter hopped down from his chair before Gamora could figure out whether to stop him. He marched across the room, his tiny fists clenched.

"Hey!" Peter yelled. "You!"

Yondu looked down at him as he took a handful of tubers from their supplies. "Quill," he said noncomittally.

"Take me home!" Peter snarled. "Let _them_ take me home, you ... you _monster!"_

"You ain't never goin' home, boy," Yondu said softly, with a slight hint of danger -- or something else, something equally velvety and dark -- in his voice. "There ain't no home for you. Not Terra, not anymore."

Gamora stood up abruptly, because there was enough and then there was the _end of enough._ And she was getting damned tired of watching this farce play out in front of her.

Something in Peter snapped and he punched Yondu hard, in the leg. Gamora took a few fast steps forward as Peter stopped, froze, and then he quailed back. She could see that he was scared.

Yondu saw it too. His fist curled, but he didn't say anything, and he walked away, quickly.

No whistle. No arrow. There was that, at least.

Gamora went forward to comfort the boy.

 

***

 

Yondu's ability to avoid everyone on a ship this size was nothing short of impressive, but Gamora eventually found him in Rocket's workshop one sleep-cycle later, soldering something in the middle of a mess of junk on one of the workbenches. Rocket was working away quietly at the opposite bench. Just the two of them in companionable silence. Gamora slid onto a stool at the end of the bench where Yondu was working. 

"Be a doll an' hand me that box'a l'il widgets there, would you?" he asked without looking up.

Gamora handed over the small plastic box she assumed he meant. "You know," she said quietly, "when Nebula and I were small girls with Thanos, we weren't allowed to have anything that was our own."

At the opposite bench, Rocket's ears twitched, but his head stayed down. Yondu carefully clicked together two parts of whatever he was working on. "That so," he said casually.

"It is so," she said. It wasn't as hard to talk about it as she'd expected it would be. Maybe getting to know that frightened, furious blue-skinned child -- seeing the echo of the child _she'd_ been -- was one reason why. "We had no toys, no clothing beyond plain items to cover ourselves. Even the weapons we trained with were not ours. There was no place for beauty in our lives, nothing that was not utilitarian. But sometimes we were given things anyway. A doll, or an especially well-balanced knife. We were given these things so they could be taken away, you understand. To threaten us with. To control us." 

Yondu said nothing, carefully selecting tiny screws from the box she'd handed him, but she sensed that he was listening.

"But then there is Peter. It took me a long while to think of this, perhaps much longer than I should have. Peter still has his music player. And the wrapped gift from his mother. All of the things he came on board your ship with. And from the way I've seen him with his music, I don't think he has the slightest fear of having it taken from him; he is not frightened or ashamed. You could have controlled him that way, broken his precious things, withheld his music player until he obeyed you. I don't think you ever did. I think he would have grown into a different man if you had."

Yondu's hand slipped; one of the tiny screws clattered across the work surface. Gamora caught it with lightning-quick reflexes. He cursed softly as she handed it back to him. "You makin' me out to be some kind of saint? You wanna hear about some of the things I've done, girl, I can tell you. I can tell you about a cave full of children's bones."

"No," Gamora said calmly. "I know what you've done. Don't forget, I have done some of the same things myself."

He didn't seem to have an answer for that.

"Yondu ... I barely remember my real father. Thanos is the closest thing I knew. None of us here on this ship have ever known our parents as anything other than a source of torment and misery --" She saw Rocket's ears dip, flattening briefly. "Except for Peter."

Yondu's jaw clenched. "Never heard you talk this much, girl."

"I do not hesitate to talk when I have something to say."

"Yeah, well, I got something to say too." Somewhat to her surprise, as they'd conducted the rest of the conversation without eye contact, Yondu swiveled his seat around to face her, and met her eyes with his grim red stare. "I don't know much about how parentin' works, guess I don't gotta tell you why, but I do know I didn't do a damn thing right with that kid. An' it's real obvious he don't think too much of me right now. Why should he? Only thing I ever did back then was scare him."

Gamora looked him dead in the eye. "So do what the rest of us on this ship have been doing the entire time you were dead," she said flatly. "Do better."

He gave her a long flat look, one lip curled to expose a flash of his uneven teeth, before he spun around to address Rocket. "Done over there, rat?"

"Just finished, an' I'll bite you if you call me that again." Rocket sat back with a flick of his tail and picked up a flat piece of plastic. "Let's see if it works, why don't we?"

Yondu grinned and reached across to retrieve the item, which he snapped into the thing he'd been working on. This was the first time Gamora got a good look at it without his arm in the way.

"That's Peter's music player! But how? It was destroyed."

"Replica," Rocket said, his ears pricking forward. "I've got a bunch of old, broken Earth junk around -- you know, just kinda pick it up if I happen to notice something when I'm out and about -- quit smilin', woman, I got the idea when I found the stash of Earth shit _he_ already had." He jerked a thumb at Yondu. "Anyway, took a few modifications, but it wasn't _that_ hard to get it to look right, get the music on there and all. Ol' Blue here says he knows what it looks like."

"I _should_ know what it looks like," Yondu said, with one of the earpieces of the headset held against his ear; Gamora heard tinny strains of music. "Spent twenty years having to patch up the damn thing every time that kid broke it, always taking it out on jobs like he does."

It looked exactly like the old one to her eyes, headphones and all. "And the songs?"

Yondu snorted. "All his music's in the ship's computer, always has been, an' I can tell you, as many times as I heard that damn tape, I'll be hearin' every last one of 'em, in order, in my nightmares." He turned off the replica Walkman and wrapped the headphone cable around it, with a quick, broken-toothed grin. "He might catch on eventually, but I think this oughta pass inspection for now. Get him to stop moping, anyways."

Gamora was aware that her own smile was a soft one. "I see you're proving my point."

"What, that I'm better'n Thanos? Low bar, girl."

"No, that alone of all of us on this ship, Peter has a father who might -- _might_ , I remind you -- be worthy of the name. You regret that you made his early life so hard for him -- I understand that. So now is your chance to do better than you did then. Your son is here, Yondu, and he needs you."

Yondu grunted, not looking at her as he shoved the replica and its headphones in her direction. "Jus' give this to him and stop yakkin' about it."

"Give it to him yourself," she said, putting it back into his hands.

 

***

 

She didn't know how that conversation went: didn't want to know whether Yondu told Peter the truth about the Walkman or whether he lied, didn't want to know if there was screaming and tears, or if it went smoothly. Instead she went down to their training room to put Mantis through some self-defense forms. The insect girl would never be truly good at fighting -- her empathy was too much of a liability -- but Gamora was pleased with Mantis's progress at learning to use her body effectively.

She no longer flinched when her bare skin brushed Mantis's. It would be inaccurate to say that it no longer bothered her, in the same way it didn't bother her when she was sparring with Drax or with Peter, but there was no longer the deep, visceral terror at having herself stripped bare.

Which still didn't make it any less annoying, as they were rehydrating and toweling off their sweat-damp hair after the workout, when Mantis said, "You are troubled about something."

"How many times have I told you not to do that?" But it wasn't said with anger, more like exasperation that might even have been tinged with fondness.

"I am not the only person who can understand emotions on this ship," Mantis pointed out. "It is just that I cannot do it by looking at people's faces. I am still learning to do that, and it is very hard for me, like trying to speak an unfamiliar language. Is it really so terrible to use my abilities to do what the rest of you can do in a different way?"

"I suppose that is a fair point," Gamora conceded. "You really have that much trouble with faces?"

Mantis shrugged and looked away, running the towel carefully over each of her antennae. "I did not have much practice in my former life." She had rarely spoken Ego's name since his planet, and Ego himself, had been destroyed. "I wanted to ask if you ... want to talk about it?"

In spite of her annoyance, Gamora was touched. "It's Peter," she said at last. It was more than that; she hadn't expected speaking of Thanos to stir those memories quite so bitterly. But Peter was a good enough reason, and it wasn't untrue. "Peter ... and Yondu."

"Oh," Mantis said quietly. "Do you think he'll hurt Peter? He -- Yondu -- won't let me touch him. I don't know what he is thinking at all."

"No," Gamora said slowly, surprised to realize how true it was. "I do not think he would hurt Peter."

It was really more the other way around.

Obviously things had been different when Peter was young, the first time. All those years ago. Back when she was slaughtering people at Thanos's demand. She'd thought she had no choice.

It was strange how things changed. How people changed.

"Thank you, Mantis," she said, throwing a towel around her neck. "I appreciate this talk. It was very helpful."

"Um ... you're welcome! I'm very happy to be helpful." Mantis's antennae stood up happily, perking up with pleasure, as Gamora left the training room.

She changed in her quarters into comfortable clothes, realizing as she pulled the T-shirt over her head that it was too big for her and was probably one of Peter's. They'd all gotten very casual about clothing-sharing around here.

_So many strings to tie us together._

Thinking about this, she wandered up to the bridge to see who was on watch. She was gratified to discover that her instincts were good: Yondu was slouched in the pilot's chair, watching the stars. This was one of the places where he could be found when he was feeling something vaguely akin to social, or what passed for it with him -- at least something a little better than "skulking around on the cargo decks" levels of avoiding people.

The steering console of the pilot's chair was lined with a half-dozen or so of the little toys that Peter had gotten in the habit of picking up when they were visiting marketplaces planetside. Yondu was idly toying with them, picking them up and setting them down. He glanced around as she came in. His coat was off, leaving him in a dark-red, sleeveless shirt. Faint traceries of scars were visible on his arms, some of them familiar to her from the younger version they had so briefly gotten to know.

"Where is --" she began, but Yondu brought a quick finger to his lips. He jerked his head toward the floor.

There beside the pilot's chair was his coat, a rumpled untidy heap of smoke-stained leather, and in the middle of it, Peter was curled up, fast asleep, wearing the Walkman headphones with the music playing audibly, just on the edge of hearing.

Gamora breathed out slowly. Then she gestured to the copilot's seat and raised an eyebrow. Yondu shrugged: _Suit yourself._ She sat down quietly and flopped a leg over the arm of the chair, wriggling her bare toes.

Yondu picked up one of the toys and pointed at her with it. "Not a word outta you," he murmured.

"I wasn't going to say anything," she murmured back, and rested her head against the back of the chair, looking out at the stars.

Peter had confessed to her once that it had taken him a long time to stop looking for the familiar star patterns he used to know on Earth. He used to look at them with his mother, who would point out the pictures in the stars. To Gamora, that was a strange way of looking at the stars, very much a planetsider's view. Of course they changed with every jump, were different from every planet in every season. Only planetsiders thought that naming star-pictures was a sensible activity.

But the stars themselves were still the same, no matter how they looked to mortal eyes, and for some reason that was comforting to her tonight.

"Have you given any thought to whether you plan to stay with us or set out on your own?" she asked Yondu quietly, looking at the stars rather than at him.

When there was no reply, she looked over to see him studying the toy. After a moment or two, he set it carefully back where he'd gotten it from.

"Somebody just recently told me there's a kid on this ship needs a father," he muttered, twisting the toy in place. "Can't be goin' nowhere as long as there's that, huh?"

"No, I suppose not." She thought about pointing out they were trying to deal with that issue, trying to get back _their_ Peter, but the words died unspoken, because of course he knew.

There were those who said excuses were a frivolous indulgence, but Gamora thought the only person who would say such a thing was one who'd never needed a mask to shield their heart. Every person on this ship understood how _that_ worked.

Instead she said only, "Good."

And they watched the stars together, while Peter's soft music kept time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> While this fic is marked complete, I'm open to the idea of doing timestamps to explore more of any of these! I'm not promising anything, but if there's anything that you especially want to see, you could let me know. :) (And yes, they do get Peter back to his regular age eventually.)


End file.
